The present invention pertains to a system providing high-speed reproduction of audio programs from master recordings of audio programs, such as sound recordings (e.g. music), at high real time speeds, but more specifically, to a reproduction method and apparatus for producing a personalized custom compilation of audio programs of high sound fidelity.
Problems of the art herein addressed include those of distributors and retailers, on one hand, and purchasers of sound recordings, on the other hand. In the sound recording industry, retailers and distributors encounter difficulties in shipping, storing and handling relatively large volumes of tapes, records and compact discs--expending substantial time and money. It is an endless effort to meet volatile and unpredictable demands of customers for popular recordings. Very often, they cannot maintain sufficient stock to meet volatile demand, and stock on hand often suffers damage due to handling. In instances of weak demand, the retailer simply does not carry certain items of music, such as classical and jazz, and thus cannot satisfy his customers. Employee pilferage presents an additional menace. Moreover, in certain high traffic communities, a premium is placed on expensive storage and display space and the retailer finds it impractical to stock a variety of audio programs.
For many of these same reasons, purchasers become frustrated in their endeavor to satisfy their own desires of listening pleasure. Very often, a purchaser enters a retail establishment to browse and listen, but encounters reluctance on the part of retailers to permit listening because of among other things, damage risk, time consumption, and package disruption. Further, because of poor sound fidelity and deterioration of most tape and vinyl media, these sound recordings have a lot be desired.
Important to a specific problem of the art that the present invention addresses is that no practical system yet exists for providing a "customized" group of selections on any recording media quickly at the point of sale. For this reason many customers make their own custom recordings. These so called "home recordings", however, run counter to yet other interests, e.g. that of artists and authors. Home recordings of copyrighted recordings not only may be illegal, but they often have such poor sound quality since they are made on consumer grade equipment, and are not made from first generation master recordings. Fourth of fifth generation slave recordings have very limited dynamic range, often unacceptable noise levels, and inherent distortion.
As a substantial contribution to the arts, the present invention aims to solve the aforementioned problems of retailers, distributors, customers, artists and authors. By providing a practically realizable store of concentrated digital representations of a multitude (15,000) of master recordings immediately retrievable and reproducible at a "point of sale" and at very high fidelity; providing a means by which these programs can rapidly be reproduced at greater-than-real-time speeds without undue waiting on the part of the customer; and yet further providing an automatic system of accounting in combination with sales so that authors can properly be rewarded for their artistic creations, then and only then can the needs, desires and expectations of all can be served simultaneously.
Attempts in the past were made to, achieve this goal, at least in part. None, however, has proven commercially successful, marketable or even practicable in a real life world in view of the relatively large amounts of data which must be handled. For instance, a juke box for retrieving slave recordings, then reproducing them is known, but prior information storage media have limited capacity to archive a practical number of master recordings of at least a few thousand or more. A practical system requires gigabytes of storage and data transfer rates of several magabytes/second in a form suitable for today's data processing systems. A present-day conventional processing system employed in this technology has a limited effective data transfer rate of about 100 to 200 kbytes/seconds. PCM (pulse-code-modulation) encoded music, for example, requires a minimum data transfer rate of about 176 kbytes/second while faster-than-real-time recording, say eight times, requires a transfer rate of 1.4 megabytes/second. Sixteen-bit PCM encoded music requires about ten megabytes of storage for each minute of music. In light of these constraints, it is evident that present systems can neither handle high-speed recording nor high volume archiving.
Prior systems not only lack the ability to produce high fidelity recordings, but either failed to offer faster-than-real-time recordings, or were too slow in data transfer rate to be effective. Attempts even were made to transmit from a central store digital representations of sound recordings over public communications networks, such as telephone lines or other public communications networks, but this technique proved impracticable due to a bottleneck in the data transfer rate and a consequent "slow" recording rate over the network. Purchasers simply will not wait one-half hour for a three-minute recording. One proposed approach utilized a wide-band "picture phone" system with a central database, but the "picture phone" system never became commercially available, and similar to satellite systems, is not cost-effective. Exemplary prior systems include those disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,528,643; 3,444,334; 4,410,917; 3,947,882; 3,718,906; 3,609,227; 4,355,338; and 3,311,378.
Accordingly, it is a general objective of the present invention to provide a practical distribution and reproduction system suitable for making high-speed customized selections of audio programs of high fidelity wherein the programs are reproduced on a slave recording medium directly from a high volume information store of master programs.
It is another objective of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for handling digital data representations of sound recordings by low-cost desktop data processing techniques in order to provide efficiency and practicality in producing high-speed, high fidelity recordings.
Another objective is to provide a method and apparatus for combining digital audio processing systems and techniques with digital data processing systems and techniques for handling audio programs.
It is another objective of the present invention to permit solution of royalty reporting concerns of authors and artists by providing a centralized computer accounting system for tracking sales and distribution of audio programs.
It is yet a further objective of the present invention to solve distributor and retailer problems of stocking, volatility of demand, damage due to handling and shipment, limited space, poor range of selection of audio programs, and stock out problems frequently encountered in retailing audio programs.
It is yet a further objective of the present invention to solve customer concerns of poor fidelity, deterioration of recording medium, limited selection of programs, and desirability of custom groups of recordings on a single tape or disk.
It is yet a further objective of the present invention to provide a system for permitting tallying of sales for royalty reporting, monitoring trends, and remotely updating distribution facilities with modified pricing and availability of audio programs, as needed.
It is a further objective of the present invention to provide faster-than-real-time recording of audio programs to minimize customer waiting time while making customized groups of audio selections.
It is also an objective to provide a practical information store or archival system for premastering original master recordings in order to reduce the quantity of storage space required for a multitude of selections while at the same time enabling high-speed and high-fidelity reproduction thereof.
Another objective of the invention concerns developing a premastering system comprising time-domain condensed digital data signals representing audio programs enabling storage of a large quantity of programs in a relatively small storage space and to facilitate higher-than-real time recording of audio programs.
It is another objective of the invention to provide a servo biasing scheme for reproducing the audio programs on a slave medium thereby to retain a substantial portion of dynamic range of the master recording.
Another objective of the invention is to provide redundant memory devices in a controller for reproducing audio programs at specifically timed and/or spaced locations on a slave medium at regular intervals on the medium thereby to provide a slave medium containing readily accessible and identifiable programs.